If you believe the ads (and God help you if you do), absolutely everyone's on AOL these days. Internet purists sneer at those poor nebbishes with AOL accounts (near as I can tell, the pecking order goes like this: free provider, .edu, aol.com, webtv.com -- you're only allowed to make fun of someone else's connection if you're actually paying for your connection and getting as little actual service as possible, which fits neatly into the ideals of geek macho. But I digress) but the sad truth is, it's big. According to friends with a great deal more money than I have, it's also the favored provider of the entertainment industry; after all, it's supposedly about the only net that provides really easy worldwide connectivity and when you're pulling down $12M per picture plus a personal hairdresser, you really don't need to have to worry about anything other than hitting the pretty buttons in the right order.
Still, AOL's clearly built its customer base out of people besides celebrities. The thing is durn huge, after all. Like it or not, geek purists, it does offer a fair bit of easily found (if not easily loaded) content, including some surprisingly effective communities, education centers and support groups. However, if anyone tells you that he's on AOL because of the vast intellectual resources there, he's probably lying. The useful stuff is nice, but the vast majority of AOL users hit the service for three reasons: stock quotes, email, and chat. (Porn takes too long to download through the AOL web browser, or so I've been told. Never looked at it myself. No, really. Honest.)
Chat on AOL is seemingly designed for those folks who never quite got the knack of TinyMUDding. Basically, all you do is click on a link to a room and there you go. Rooms generally hold 23 or so people at the max, with conversation appearing in text with a screen name attribution. Clever folks can change their chat font, color and size, while truly annoying ones make a habit of calling AOL's built-in sounds and annoying the living hell out of everyone else in the room. There are roughly umpty-jillion chat rooms on the service, broken down by topic. Most are fairly innocuous -- sports is a favorite topic, and there are innumerable ones devoted to books, geographic locations, auto repair, Britney Spears and the like -- but there's one particular subheading that sticks out like a red, throbbing thumb. That's Romance, and it's a doozy. On any given night, there are at a rough estimate 300+ Romance-themed chat rooms going, in theory broken down by special romantic interest. In actuality, that means that 75% of the rooms are supposedly devoted to lesbians of one stripe or another -- butch, femme, older, younger, heavier, lighter, fans of Michael Bolton, you name it -- though the sneaking suspicion here is that to populate this many chat rooms, either AOL's managed to get every lesbian on the planet hooked up and chatting or there are a lot of pathetic male pervs smarming around these things trying to look innocuous and drooling discreetly on their unshaven chins.
The rest of the chat rooms are dedicated to other topics, ranging from "Flirting" to various ethnic groups to "Married" (which never quite made sense to me -- if I were going to have an affair with someone who was married, I'd find a more discreet way to initiate the bloody thing than via AOL. Then again, that's just me). If the particular room you select is full, you get automatically bounced to a similar room with a sequential title, such as "Flirt's Nook 3" or "No Really We're All Lesbians In Here Despite The Fact That Our Online Profiles Say That We're All Named Ralph 6" though it's generally a good idea to be careful in the room you select -- any other AOL user seeking to locate you will be able to get the name of the chat room you're in, and if it's "Barely Legal Nymphomaniacs 2" you may have some interesting questions to answer.
Now, you may be wondering where all this is going. (Either that, or you've stopped reading, in which case I don't have to care about what you think anymore anyway.) The sad truth of the matter is that I have a confession to make. Alone in a fairly inhospitable state, 400 miles from my SO, bored to tears with the local cable offerings and stricken with insomnia, I broke down and, in the interest of doing research, wandered into the shark tank they call AOL Chat.
But, being a conscientious sort, I didn't just wander into any AOL chat room. I wasn't interested in the baseball chat (which consists mainly of fair-weather Yankees fans whose primary interest is in telling everyone else that other teams "fuckin' suck and that the Yankees RULE!" Incidentally, doing so is an AOL Terms of Service violation, but that's neither here nor there), nor was I after anything too educational. Instead, I muttered a silent Shema, mentally asked all pertinent parties for forgiveness, and leapt into possibly the most frightening place on all of AOL: Romance -- Jewish Singles.
Now, before anything else gets said, let me say that there are a surprising number of interesting, well-spoken, interesting folks lurking in that particular specie of chat room. In my time there, I found myself having challenging discussions on medical ethics, the publishing industry, and print vs. online journalism. There are a lot of people out there who, for one reason or another, do feel isolated from their culture, and figure that a place called "Jewish Singles" is a good place at least to get a vicarious shot of it. To those people, I am quite grateful, and I fully expect I'll stay in at least occasional contact over email with some of them, because good conversation is good conversation no matter where you find it. On the other hand, there are some real freaks out there, too, and it's the pathology of the scary ones that's worth commenting on.
To no one's surprise, the regular residents of Jewish Singles can be pigeonholed into a few neat categories, with relatively few stragglers. Indeed, most nights bring to mind echoes of Steve Martin's individualist pledge, with dozens of hairy-chested and beyarmulked guys thumping on their pecs and trying to prove they're individuals by aping every other guy in there. Thankfully, the monotony does get broken up on occasion. The classic types of attendee are:
THE CRUISERS
Surprisingly enough, a large percentage of the people who frequent the room are actually looking for romance, to one degree or another -- at least if your definition of romance is broad enough to include "typing naughty words at one another with one hand on the keyboard." The vast majority of these randomized Romeos are, shockingly enough, male; women are rare enough in the room to be able to sit there, pick and choose between suitors. However, there's a never-ending flow of would-be swains. Most arrive and perform the ritual self-statting, which generally reads "M/34/NYC" (though New York can be swapped out approximately 50% of the time for Los Angeles, or occasionally Boston. As near as I can tell, if AOL is a representative sample there are no unattached Jews anywhere outside those three cities. Fortunately, I'm happily attached, but clearly, were anything to go wrong with my relationship I'd have to choose between moving to Boston, LA or NY, or never getting any rabbinically appropriate nookie again.)
Sadly, most of the Cruisers are pathetically predictable. After announcing their age, gender (as if we couldn't guess) and location, they then proceed to ask if there are any "females" from their neck of the woods in the room. Why precisely they ask for "females" instead of "women" is one of the great mysteries of online romance; one would think they're actually alien zookeepers looking to stock their collections, or perhaps third year genetics student who struck out with the local representatives of the Wanda Tishler School of Beauty. They also eagerly greet anyone with a female-sounding screen name who enters the room, and they have a habit of being depressingly literal. One woman whose sarcastic screen name implied that she was less than attractive precisely to fend off this sort of idiot instead got buried in questions asking if she really was in fact ugly. Last time I checked, she'd taken to emailing out a scanned picture of a supermodel in answer to that sort of question, just to really blow the average goofball's mind. And yes, the Cruisers are very much in the market for pictures, or "pics" as they call them. Any woman who shows the slightest inclination toward conversation is immediately hounded for a pic; any woman who refuses to send one around is badgered, castigated and in many cases denigrated if she refuses to send along a GIF. Thankfully, when it gets to the last stage the rest of the room usually gets together to beat the offender over the head with a stick, though most sadly have no idea that they're committing harassment instead of being persistent, devoted and charming.
Generally, the Cruisers are sadly indiscriminatory. They'll take romance wherever they get it, and they're impossible to discourage. If the first 37 women into the chat room all tell a particular cruiser to go blow, he'll live in hope that the 38th will swoon for him. The brassiest simply announce their studliness and ask who might be interested in a little cyber horizontal rhumba; the shyer ones sometimes just cruise user profiles and send painfully blunt Instant Messages. Either way, the success rate looks to be appallingly low, as the same guys are there night after night after night.
THE NAZIS AND THE PREACHERS
While these two categories can be distinct, they generally behave in ways that are indistinguishable. The twits in the former generally come into the room and announce themselves with something along the line of "WASSUP MY JEWS????" Few have online profiles and most have screen names that end in 4-digit numbers, which indicates that the particular account being used was registered simply for the purpose of wandering around and harassing assorted folks. (Well, either that or that the idiot at the keyboard can't even figure out AOL's Profile menu, which tells you all you need to know about the staggering intellects we're dealing with here.)
Some don't even bother with that, and dive right into the baiting with comments like "HIEL HITLER," "NO PLACE FOR JEWS IN AMERIKKA" or, my favorite, "HILTER" repeated five or ten times. Hilter, it seems, was the guy no one knew about in the Third Reich, but somehow these bozos have uncovered his existence and feel determined to venerate him online in Jewish chat rooms. The other possibility is that they're really, really dumb, but who'd think that American neo-Nazis on AOL would be less than intellectual titans? Not I, certainly -- not in a thousand years. (Note: Correcting the spelling of your average AOL Naziwannabee generally gets you insulted as a know-it-all Jew by the idiot in question and draws laughs from the rest of the room. Try it. It's fun.)
On average, anywhere from two to five nerdoNazis will pop up in a Jewish Singles room over the course of an evening, often in clusters. They make crude sexual comments, mistype Hitler's name a lot, and occasionally make threats -- I've received about a dozen of the latter myself, including one that was specific enough to make me change my user profile to be a hell of a lot less specific about myself. At any given point, one member of the room will go toe to toe with the yahoos in an attempt to make them go away (or to win points with potential admirers); wiser users simply toggle on the "Ignore" function after sending AOL notice that, yes, there are more assholes annoying the paying customers. Once the Nazis stop getting reactions, they tend to wander off, no doubt to harass some other specialty chat room, but in the meantime they've left behind annoyance at best, and some real anger at worst.
How to Spot A Nazi In Jewish Singles
1. Most nerdoNazis have screen names that have four digit numbers at the end of them and no attached profiles. This means that the screen name in question is designed to be easily abandoned and not easily traceable (never mind the fact that AOL can, if it really wants to, just see whose name is on the credit card paying for the account)
2. A lot of nerdoNazis TEND TO TYPE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. They tend to think this somehow makes the text appear louder, God alone knows why. Near as I can tell, silent text is silent text, and it's not like typing in capitals increases the font size any.
3. NerdoNazis, if attempting to camouflage their intents, generally try to strike up conversations with lines like "Where are all the hot Jewish females at?" Now, I've been a Nice Jewish Boy for nearly 30 years, and I have to say, Jewish women (not "females") are only hot when they're visiting elderly relatives in South Florida. Then, they do something called "perspiring," "shvitzing" or "glowing" -- not "online chatting." Jewish women can be and frequently are attractive, stunning, beautiful, gorgeous, sexy, alluring, charming, seductive and any number of other adjectives designed to demonstrate how attractive they are, but they are not now and never will be "hot" -- at least, not in the minds of Nice Jewish Boys like me.
4. NerdoNazis are depressingly literal. If the word "black" is in your screen name, they will assume that you are in fact African-American and begin using racial epithets as well. (The whole idea of "goth culture" seems to have escaped them, big surprise.)
Similar in approach are the Preachers, who view the Jewish chat rooms as fertile ground for new converts. Apparently no one informed these bozos that the reason people go to Jewish chat rooms is to be with other Jews, but hey, it's a free country, and there's certainly no mohel's proof of purchase check at the door to the chat room. However, once the Preachers set up shop inside, all hell generally does tend to break loose. The Nazis, as vile as they are, can generally be laughed at because their attempts at antiSemitism are so pathetic. The Preachers, on the other hand, never, ever let it go, and their condescension can empty a room of its intended users in seconds flat. Now, I may be in the minority here, but on a certain level I think it's kind of sweet that someone else cares enough about my soul to try to save it. However, I'd really prefer it if religious proselytizers behaved more like long distance company reps. I'd love to be able to say to an online Jesus freak "Thank you, but I'm very happy with the service I'm getting from my current religion, and have no interest in changing," have them wish me a nice day and then hang up and stop bothering me. Unfortunately, the bulk of the Preachers who wander into Jewish Singles have the mentality of a starving rat terrier. They're not fishermen for souls, they're spiritual Ahabs, careening pell-mell toward Moby (circumcised) Dick (one presumes in this analogy that the giant whale has laid off of the giant squid in its diet, as calamari ain't kosher) in a ruinous quest that has no chance of succeeding, but every chance of pissing a whole lot of people off.
The approach that the Preachers use is curious at best; one assumes it's copied from a real-life model somewhere because on its own, it really doesn't make a lot of sense. Generally, a Preacher announces that he's there to save everyone in the room (bright ones send in plants beforehand to say "Let's listen to what he has to say!" before revealing their true colors), gets huffy when he doesn't exactly meet a receptive audience, and then spends the rest of the night alternately insulting and cozening his targets. Telling someone that he's a damned, hateful soul who rejects God's love, and then asking him to reject a central tenet of his personality and culture works about as well as you might think it does, and repetitions of the cycle generally don't help much.
Occasionally Bible quotations get dragged in to support the Preacher's argument, with various chunks of Isaiah being particular favorites. To no one's surprise, the quotes in question are generally vague or taken way the hell out of context, and also seem to have been fed to the Preachers to repeat by rote. Quoting anything that wasn't what a Preacher was directly prepared to discuss (Go on, challenge a proselytizer on something from the Book of Habbakuk. Five bucks says they'll have no idea what you're talking about) tends to result in stammers, long silences, and more insults. Preachers generally last longer than nerdoNazis do, and it often takes an AOL online host to haul them out. One suspects that there's some sort of organized effort to land these people in the Jewish chat rooms continually, as all of them sound so similar and till the same soil. However, if there's a less likely batch of converts than geeky, horny, insomniac Jews, I don't know what it is, and I'm all for whatever bunch of nimrods funds the Preachers continuing to waste their money beating their empty heads against a figurative brick wall.
MORE JEW THAN YOU
Now, it goes without saying that there are different degrees of observance among Jews in America, and it's no surprise that you get a fairly wide cross-section in the Jewish Singles room. Myself, I tend toward the lighter side of the occasion, but I think it's great that there are folks holding conversations in Hebrew in there and otherwise discussing aspects of the religion and culture that, for whatever reason, I don't partake of. However, there are also those geniuses who feel compelled (maybe it's a mating ritual. I dunno) to let everyone else in the room know how utterly concerned they are with Jewish IssuesTM, more so than anyone else there, and how anyone who doesn't take Jewish IssuesTM as seriously as they do is threatening the survival of the Jewish people as a whole. Declarations like these are often followed up by announcements of personal suffering that the announcer has gone through because he's Jewish, and a general denunciation of any non-Jews in the room. (Yeah, we let them in. Most are pretty nice and are genuinely curious about what the heck Judaism is. Call me crazy, but isn't that sort of tolerance and curiosity exactly what American freedom of religion is all about? Sheesh.)
Now, rest assured that I take Jewish issues (with a small "I") very seriously, and I have nothing but respect for those who take serious action to make this country and world a better, safer place to be Jewish in. On the other hand, I find it impossible to respect anyone who takes the totality of Jewish struggle in America and boils it down to "I'm the boss of this chat room."
(I'll put it another way: Look, pal, if you're really that into Jewish IssuesTM, go out and do something that puts your money where your mouth is. You'll actually be accomplishing something and odds are, you'll meet more than the 23 Jews a given chat room can hold. If, on the other hand, you're only interested in pontificating about your shtick, shaddup, get a lollipop and move on, because odds are that everyone in the room's gone through something similar to what you have. We've just got other things to talk about on occasion.)
Still, these jokers continue to show up and shake their tiny fists at the world. Unfortunately for them, in a chat room letting loose your barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world generally reads like this: yawp. The rest of us, on the other hand, are quite grateful for that fact.
THE SNIPERS
This, in the end, is the category that I fell into. Snipers generally sit back, absent themselves from the conversation, and take potshots at people making particular asses of themselves in the room. The majority of Snipers I talked to already were involved in stable relationships, and their reasons for coming to the chat room could be boiled down to "watching the circus." Most spend their energy in private conversation that's struck up after a particularly witty public evisceration of some poor fool or other. What the Snipers don't realize, or at least try to ignore, is the fact that they're still getting their social jollies out of hanging around an AOL chat room, too. In the land of the blind, no one can see you're wearing cool shades.
IN CONCLUSION
Of course, this rough assessment leaves out the porn merchants, the sad and desperate souls who seize on any conversation as intent of a lifelong commitment, and any number of other beasties prowling the virtual corridors, but here's the heart of the Jewish Singles chat experience. As I said, there are surprises to be found, and who knows? There just might be couples actually getting together off of this thing, and more power to them. Lord knows that the roster of regulars does have fairly steady turnover, and hopefully that means that someone, somewhere (most likely NYC or LA) is hooking up. But the chat room is eternal, and though the cast changes, the play remains, ever the dreary same.
Got a pic?
Still, AOL's clearly built its customer base out of people besides celebrities. The thing is durn huge, after all. Like it or not, geek purists, it does offer a fair bit of easily found (if not easily loaded) content, including some surprisingly effective communities, education centers and support groups. However, if anyone tells you that he's on AOL because of the vast intellectual resources there, he's probably lying. The useful stuff is nice, but the vast majority of AOL users hit the service for three reasons: stock quotes, email, and chat. (Porn takes too long to download through the AOL web browser, or so I've been told. Never looked at it myself. No, really. Honest.)
Chat on AOL is seemingly designed for those folks who never quite got the knack of TinyMUDding. Basically, all you do is click on a link to a room and there you go. Rooms generally hold 23 or so people at the max, with conversation appearing in text with a screen name attribution. Clever folks can change their chat font, color and size, while truly annoying ones make a habit of calling AOL's built-in sounds and annoying the living hell out of everyone else in the room. There are roughly umpty-jillion chat rooms on the service, broken down by topic. Most are fairly innocuous -- sports is a favorite topic, and there are innumerable ones devoted to books, geographic locations, auto repair, Britney Spears and the like -- but there's one particular subheading that sticks out like a red, throbbing thumb. That's Romance, and it's a doozy. On any given night, there are at a rough estimate 300+ Romance-themed chat rooms going, in theory broken down by special romantic interest. In actuality, that means that 75% of the rooms are supposedly devoted to lesbians of one stripe or another -- butch, femme, older, younger, heavier, lighter, fans of Michael Bolton, you name it -- though the sneaking suspicion here is that to populate this many chat rooms, either AOL's managed to get every lesbian on the planet hooked up and chatting or there are a lot of pathetic male pervs smarming around these things trying to look innocuous and drooling discreetly on their unshaven chins.
The rest of the chat rooms are dedicated to other topics, ranging from "Flirting" to various ethnic groups to "Married" (which never quite made sense to me -- if I were going to have an affair with someone who was married, I'd find a more discreet way to initiate the bloody thing than via AOL. Then again, that's just me). If the particular room you select is full, you get automatically bounced to a similar room with a sequential title, such as "Flirt's Nook 3" or "No Really We're All Lesbians In Here Despite The Fact That Our Online Profiles Say That We're All Named Ralph 6" though it's generally a good idea to be careful in the room you select -- any other AOL user seeking to locate you will be able to get the name of the chat room you're in, and if it's "Barely Legal Nymphomaniacs 2" you may have some interesting questions to answer.
Now, you may be wondering where all this is going. (Either that, or you've stopped reading, in which case I don't have to care about what you think anymore anyway.) The sad truth of the matter is that I have a confession to make. Alone in a fairly inhospitable state, 400 miles from my SO, bored to tears with the local cable offerings and stricken with insomnia, I broke down and, in the interest of doing research, wandered into the shark tank they call AOL Chat.
But, being a conscientious sort, I didn't just wander into any AOL chat room. I wasn't interested in the baseball chat (which consists mainly of fair-weather Yankees fans whose primary interest is in telling everyone else that other teams "fuckin' suck and that the Yankees RULE!" Incidentally, doing so is an AOL Terms of Service violation, but that's neither here nor there), nor was I after anything too educational. Instead, I muttered a silent Shema, mentally asked all pertinent parties for forgiveness, and leapt into possibly the most frightening place on all of AOL: Romance -- Jewish Singles.
Now, before anything else gets said, let me say that there are a surprising number of interesting, well-spoken, interesting folks lurking in that particular specie of chat room. In my time there, I found myself having challenging discussions on medical ethics, the publishing industry, and print vs. online journalism. There are a lot of people out there who, for one reason or another, do feel isolated from their culture, and figure that a place called "Jewish Singles" is a good place at least to get a vicarious shot of it. To those people, I am quite grateful, and I fully expect I'll stay in at least occasional contact over email with some of them, because good conversation is good conversation no matter where you find it. On the other hand, there are some real freaks out there, too, and it's the pathology of the scary ones that's worth commenting on.
To no one's surprise, the regular residents of Jewish Singles can be pigeonholed into a few neat categories, with relatively few stragglers. Indeed, most nights bring to mind echoes of Steve Martin's individualist pledge, with dozens of hairy-chested and beyarmulked guys thumping on their pecs and trying to prove they're individuals by aping every other guy in there. Thankfully, the monotony does get broken up on occasion. The classic types of attendee are:
THE CRUISERS
Surprisingly enough, a large percentage of the people who frequent the room are actually looking for romance, to one degree or another -- at least if your definition of romance is broad enough to include "typing naughty words at one another with one hand on the keyboard." The vast majority of these randomized Romeos are, shockingly enough, male; women are rare enough in the room to be able to sit there, pick and choose between suitors. However, there's a never-ending flow of would-be swains. Most arrive and perform the ritual self-statting, which generally reads "M/34/NYC" (though New York can be swapped out approximately 50% of the time for Los Angeles, or occasionally Boston. As near as I can tell, if AOL is a representative sample there are no unattached Jews anywhere outside those three cities. Fortunately, I'm happily attached, but clearly, were anything to go wrong with my relationship I'd have to choose between moving to Boston, LA or NY, or never getting any rabbinically appropriate nookie again.)
Sadly, most of the Cruisers are pathetically predictable. After announcing their age, gender (as if we couldn't guess) and location, they then proceed to ask if there are any "females" from their neck of the woods in the room. Why precisely they ask for "females" instead of "women" is one of the great mysteries of online romance; one would think they're actually alien zookeepers looking to stock their collections, or perhaps third year genetics student who struck out with the local representatives of the Wanda Tishler School of Beauty. They also eagerly greet anyone with a female-sounding screen name who enters the room, and they have a habit of being depressingly literal. One woman whose sarcastic screen name implied that she was less than attractive precisely to fend off this sort of idiot instead got buried in questions asking if she really was in fact ugly. Last time I checked, she'd taken to emailing out a scanned picture of a supermodel in answer to that sort of question, just to really blow the average goofball's mind. And yes, the Cruisers are very much in the market for pictures, or "pics" as they call them. Any woman who shows the slightest inclination toward conversation is immediately hounded for a pic; any woman who refuses to send one around is badgered, castigated and in many cases denigrated if she refuses to send along a GIF. Thankfully, when it gets to the last stage the rest of the room usually gets together to beat the offender over the head with a stick, though most sadly have no idea that they're committing harassment instead of being persistent, devoted and charming.
Generally, the Cruisers are sadly indiscriminatory. They'll take romance wherever they get it, and they're impossible to discourage. If the first 37 women into the chat room all tell a particular cruiser to go blow, he'll live in hope that the 38th will swoon for him. The brassiest simply announce their studliness and ask who might be interested in a little cyber horizontal rhumba; the shyer ones sometimes just cruise user profiles and send painfully blunt Instant Messages. Either way, the success rate looks to be appallingly low, as the same guys are there night after night after night.
THE NAZIS AND THE PREACHERS
While these two categories can be distinct, they generally behave in ways that are indistinguishable. The twits in the former generally come into the room and announce themselves with something along the line of "WASSUP MY JEWS????" Few have online profiles and most have screen names that end in 4-digit numbers, which indicates that the particular account being used was registered simply for the purpose of wandering around and harassing assorted folks. (Well, either that or that the idiot at the keyboard can't even figure out AOL's Profile menu, which tells you all you need to know about the staggering intellects we're dealing with here.)
Some don't even bother with that, and dive right into the baiting with comments like "HIEL HITLER," "NO PLACE FOR JEWS IN AMERIKKA" or, my favorite, "HILTER" repeated five or ten times. Hilter, it seems, was the guy no one knew about in the Third Reich, but somehow these bozos have uncovered his existence and feel determined to venerate him online in Jewish chat rooms. The other possibility is that they're really, really dumb, but who'd think that American neo-Nazis on AOL would be less than intellectual titans? Not I, certainly -- not in a thousand years. (Note: Correcting the spelling of your average AOL Naziwannabee generally gets you insulted as a know-it-all Jew by the idiot in question and draws laughs from the rest of the room. Try it. It's fun.)
On average, anywhere from two to five nerdoNazis will pop up in a Jewish Singles room over the course of an evening, often in clusters. They make crude sexual comments, mistype Hitler's name a lot, and occasionally make threats -- I've received about a dozen of the latter myself, including one that was specific enough to make me change my user profile to be a hell of a lot less specific about myself. At any given point, one member of the room will go toe to toe with the yahoos in an attempt to make them go away (or to win points with potential admirers); wiser users simply toggle on the "Ignore" function after sending AOL notice that, yes, there are more assholes annoying the paying customers. Once the Nazis stop getting reactions, they tend to wander off, no doubt to harass some other specialty chat room, but in the meantime they've left behind annoyance at best, and some real anger at worst.
How to Spot A Nazi In Jewish Singles
1. Most nerdoNazis have screen names that have four digit numbers at the end of them and no attached profiles. This means that the screen name in question is designed to be easily abandoned and not easily traceable (never mind the fact that AOL can, if it really wants to, just see whose name is on the credit card paying for the account)
2. A lot of nerdoNazis TEND TO TYPE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. They tend to think this somehow makes the text appear louder, God alone knows why. Near as I can tell, silent text is silent text, and it's not like typing in capitals increases the font size any.
3. NerdoNazis, if attempting to camouflage their intents, generally try to strike up conversations with lines like "Where are all the hot Jewish females at?" Now, I've been a Nice Jewish Boy for nearly 30 years, and I have to say, Jewish women (not "females") are only hot when they're visiting elderly relatives in South Florida. Then, they do something called "perspiring," "shvitzing" or "glowing" -- not "online chatting." Jewish women can be and frequently are attractive, stunning, beautiful, gorgeous, sexy, alluring, charming, seductive and any number of other adjectives designed to demonstrate how attractive they are, but they are not now and never will be "hot" -- at least, not in the minds of Nice Jewish Boys like me.
4. NerdoNazis are depressingly literal. If the word "black" is in your screen name, they will assume that you are in fact African-American and begin using racial epithets as well. (The whole idea of "goth culture" seems to have escaped them, big surprise.)
Similar in approach are the Preachers, who view the Jewish chat rooms as fertile ground for new converts. Apparently no one informed these bozos that the reason people go to Jewish chat rooms is to be with other Jews, but hey, it's a free country, and there's certainly no mohel's proof of purchase check at the door to the chat room. However, once the Preachers set up shop inside, all hell generally does tend to break loose. The Nazis, as vile as they are, can generally be laughed at because their attempts at antiSemitism are so pathetic. The Preachers, on the other hand, never, ever let it go, and their condescension can empty a room of its intended users in seconds flat. Now, I may be in the minority here, but on a certain level I think it's kind of sweet that someone else cares enough about my soul to try to save it. However, I'd really prefer it if religious proselytizers behaved more like long distance company reps. I'd love to be able to say to an online Jesus freak "Thank you, but I'm very happy with the service I'm getting from my current religion, and have no interest in changing," have them wish me a nice day and then hang up and stop bothering me. Unfortunately, the bulk of the Preachers who wander into Jewish Singles have the mentality of a starving rat terrier. They're not fishermen for souls, they're spiritual Ahabs, careening pell-mell toward Moby (circumcised) Dick (one presumes in this analogy that the giant whale has laid off of the giant squid in its diet, as calamari ain't kosher) in a ruinous quest that has no chance of succeeding, but every chance of pissing a whole lot of people off.
The approach that the Preachers use is curious at best; one assumes it's copied from a real-life model somewhere because on its own, it really doesn't make a lot of sense. Generally, a Preacher announces that he's there to save everyone in the room (bright ones send in plants beforehand to say "Let's listen to what he has to say!" before revealing their true colors), gets huffy when he doesn't exactly meet a receptive audience, and then spends the rest of the night alternately insulting and cozening his targets. Telling someone that he's a damned, hateful soul who rejects God's love, and then asking him to reject a central tenet of his personality and culture works about as well as you might think it does, and repetitions of the cycle generally don't help much.
Occasionally Bible quotations get dragged in to support the Preacher's argument, with various chunks of Isaiah being particular favorites. To no one's surprise, the quotes in question are generally vague or taken way the hell out of context, and also seem to have been fed to the Preachers to repeat by rote. Quoting anything that wasn't what a Preacher was directly prepared to discuss (Go on, challenge a proselytizer on something from the Book of Habbakuk. Five bucks says they'll have no idea what you're talking about) tends to result in stammers, long silences, and more insults. Preachers generally last longer than nerdoNazis do, and it often takes an AOL online host to haul them out. One suspects that there's some sort of organized effort to land these people in the Jewish chat rooms continually, as all of them sound so similar and till the same soil. However, if there's a less likely batch of converts than geeky, horny, insomniac Jews, I don't know what it is, and I'm all for whatever bunch of nimrods funds the Preachers continuing to waste their money beating their empty heads against a figurative brick wall.
MORE JEW THAN YOU
Now, it goes without saying that there are different degrees of observance among Jews in America, and it's no surprise that you get a fairly wide cross-section in the Jewish Singles room. Myself, I tend toward the lighter side of the occasion, but I think it's great that there are folks holding conversations in Hebrew in there and otherwise discussing aspects of the religion and culture that, for whatever reason, I don't partake of. However, there are also those geniuses who feel compelled (maybe it's a mating ritual. I dunno) to let everyone else in the room know how utterly concerned they are with Jewish IssuesTM, more so than anyone else there, and how anyone who doesn't take Jewish IssuesTM as seriously as they do is threatening the survival of the Jewish people as a whole. Declarations like these are often followed up by announcements of personal suffering that the announcer has gone through because he's Jewish, and a general denunciation of any non-Jews in the room. (Yeah, we let them in. Most are pretty nice and are genuinely curious about what the heck Judaism is. Call me crazy, but isn't that sort of tolerance and curiosity exactly what American freedom of religion is all about? Sheesh.)
Now, rest assured that I take Jewish issues (with a small "I") very seriously, and I have nothing but respect for those who take serious action to make this country and world a better, safer place to be Jewish in. On the other hand, I find it impossible to respect anyone who takes the totality of Jewish struggle in America and boils it down to "I'm the boss of this chat room."
(I'll put it another way: Look, pal, if you're really that into Jewish IssuesTM, go out and do something that puts your money where your mouth is. You'll actually be accomplishing something and odds are, you'll meet more than the 23 Jews a given chat room can hold. If, on the other hand, you're only interested in pontificating about your shtick, shaddup, get a lollipop and move on, because odds are that everyone in the room's gone through something similar to what you have. We've just got other things to talk about on occasion.)
Still, these jokers continue to show up and shake their tiny fists at the world. Unfortunately for them, in a chat room letting loose your barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world generally reads like this: yawp. The rest of us, on the other hand, are quite grateful for that fact.
THE SNIPERS
This, in the end, is the category that I fell into. Snipers generally sit back, absent themselves from the conversation, and take potshots at people making particular asses of themselves in the room. The majority of Snipers I talked to already were involved in stable relationships, and their reasons for coming to the chat room could be boiled down to "watching the circus." Most spend their energy in private conversation that's struck up after a particularly witty public evisceration of some poor fool or other. What the Snipers don't realize, or at least try to ignore, is the fact that they're still getting their social jollies out of hanging around an AOL chat room, too. In the land of the blind, no one can see you're wearing cool shades.
IN CONCLUSION
Of course, this rough assessment leaves out the porn merchants, the sad and desperate souls who seize on any conversation as intent of a lifelong commitment, and any number of other beasties prowling the virtual corridors, but here's the heart of the Jewish Singles chat experience. As I said, there are surprises to be found, and who knows? There just might be couples actually getting together off of this thing, and more power to them. Lord knows that the roster of regulars does have fairly steady turnover, and hopefully that means that someone, somewhere (most likely NYC or LA) is hooking up. But the chat room is eternal, and though the cast changes, the play remains, ever the dreary same.
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